Astronaut's Log: There is the Flower

3.0

In the oxygen garden I have seen a lovely flower. It has pallid blue petals that remain crisp even when the misters run. The light in the garden is unkind; the white, numbered walls austere and uninviting. Still, the delicate beauty of this lovely flower draws me back and back again. I stand, even now, gazing upon the precariously poised blossom. I am reminded of a dream I once saw hanging in a now long-forgotten gallery. It was a riverside scene in pastels. Another reverie comes to mind, this one painstakingly recorded in the visions of Chaucer. The young poet lies in a merry field, his eyes heavy with the tiresome strain of “the olde bookes,” and he contemplates the dandelion. How he adores the precious wild dandelion! For a long time he is perfectly happy there, enraptured, whiling away the happy hours and making love to his happy flower. The faery court arrives. The poet is chastised. He is grave and, perhaps like Dante, near the point of swooning. The faery king defers to his devastatingly beautiful kinswoman. A ghastly pale blossom upon her cheek, she charges the poet to write on the works of good women, so that he might atone for untold wretched libels.

3.1
Hands, that cut the rose. Bleeding hands, that have too much felt the barbed stem. Funny how the rose is our favorite flower. We can’t resist it. It’s too poetic. I think about some frozen roses in one of the supermarkets back home. How lonesome can you get? Try to think about dried up rose petals. Some pressed in a book. Some crushed into weird open house potpourris. I think of many things to say to a rose. I think to myself, “This is the day I shall speak my mind,” but even Churchill struggled with speech impediments in his youth.

I dream of the day. I imagine the soft-filtered reel of the unreal running in a smoky movie house before my mind’s eye. The day never comes. Never comes the day, and other clichés. If I wrote one ode to a rose I must keep it short, spruce. Not more Petrarch, not mere romance. Just some simple, objective words upon the usual subjects.

3.2

I gather my thoughts like so many fallen petals, and resume my duties on one of the upper decks. In the research labs and conference rooms, my colleagues and I scour endless data reports and star maps into the wee hours of another stealth morning. There is a ceaseless furrowing of brows and smearings of hands over faces as we push ourselves harder, and ever closer to the brink, in a race against time. Time.

“If we had but world enough, and time.”

…TRANSMISSION ENDS.


"This Is A Low" - Blur


explain to me the concept of purchasing power parity, again, for it does comfort me so